neonellipsis - Tumblr blog

[neonellipsis]

Roses are red / Gender is performative / Mass-market romance / Is heteronormative

(mathgay)

[neonellipsis]

#gathering at the #hearth Over 800,000 years and still going strong Thai agricultural pamphlets and textbooks used to comment on the use of #chickens in farms as objects under womens' care. So the domestication of chickens in SEA? that's almost 8000 years of women's work right there. (But i think industrially bred hormone-pumped & grounded chickens are another hi/story) Ref Walker and Farrelly: #thai #environmental #knowledge in #knowledge #handbooks A little bit of #social history to go with #natural #history #naturalhistorymuseum #dc #southeastasia #wanderinguterus #bodymatters (at Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History) https://www.instagram.com/p/Bo9QwBNH2R3/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1ajtkzpo454t2

[neonellipsis]

#gathering at the #hearth Over 800,000 years and still going strong Thai agricultural pamphlets and textbooks used to comment on the use of #chickens in farms as objects under womens' care. So the domestication of chickens in SEA? that's almost 8000 years of women's work right there. (But i think industrially bred hormone-pumped & grounded chickens are another hi/story) Ref Walker and Farrelly: #thai #environmental #knowledge in #knowledge #handbooks A little bit of #social history to go with #natural #history #naturalhistorymuseum #dc #southeastasia #wanderinguterus #bodymatters (at Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History) https://www.instagram.com/p/Bo9QwBNH2R3/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1ajtkzpo454t2

[neonellipsis]

We never know where we are going in life. Things of the last few days have reminded me why I do what I do, and how matters of emotion are so closely tied to all our struggles to make beauty out of the pieces we find. This song by Angela Aki often surfaces for me when I need reassurance, in times of comfort or anguish. It saw me through some thorny years. I gave it to someone dear many years ago when he was disappearing, who has today grown back to fill out the body and life he has. May it also bring others some peace and love. 手紙~ 拝啓15の君へ~ by Angela Aki 'A letter: dear 15 year old you' EN: "Everything in life has meaning/a reason; And for all you know, it/you might be nurturing your dream (right now)." You can find it here: https://youtu.be/siQJhIp-UTU (Also the best MV dedicated to this song I've seen)

[neonellipsis]

It's been such a crazy 6 days at #DINACON and now that I'm back in the city, I want to go back again! This is the one conference I've been to that gets better with age - even after you've left it. So much fun to think about projects that keep evolving as new people come in. Such an awesome little growing bacterial community of people! @digital.naturalism.conference

[neonellipsis]

Food Conspiracy. 1. any substance taken into and assimilated by a plant or animal to keep it alive and enable it to grow. 2. a plan agreed upon, the group taking part in such a plan; hence, 3. when high prices threaten the community, the poor unite, cut costs, in order to survive. Artist: Ralph

[neonellipsis]

Fuzzy Bird watercolour, video still from Iraville https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjRk2g_F95Q

WIP for a friend 

[neonellipsis]

Qualia I, II, III (2017)

S L E E P / W A L K   ART COLLECTIVE

[neonellipsis]

Peering at different scales... Kamin Lertchaiprasert's work at Gillman has a melancholy air to it, the feeling of beings trapped and who can't be set free of their frames, or the order in which they are stacked. I usually like his work but this felt fenced in, glass-boxed, on display... they don't at all look out of place in Singapore. #gillmanbarracks #kaminlertchaiprasert

[neonellipsis]

Atlanta (2016)

[neonellipsis]

Watching as the last petals fall but the stem and 🙅‍♀️ remains - 🏴 Something in me triggers a reaction to a neighbour when she asks if I have been going to Third World (read: poor) countries, to work, and her husband had also asked if I were doing social work. “I”m not doing humanitarian work,” I tell her, watching my inner seethe begin—she has no hint of my inner condition except a certain bluntness to my tone. She is bemused. “I don’t see the work in that way.” 🛃the act of love, applied with best intents, can strip people of their sovereignty. Doesn’t the coo-ing over poor adults and children reduce people not only to material lacks, which may be real or a matter of poverty policy/rhetorical framing, and to spiritual and emotional lack, but also reduces them to an inability to care for one’s people? Thus failures of leadership, long-term thinking, good executive decision-making, and other qualities associated with functional adulthood. Humanitarian aid built on uneven ground is flawed from its foundations... 🚸 〰️It is made for the powerless in exchange for their bodies and their future〰️ ...foundations that frame people so that the “population wearing out in the space of ordinariness becomes a figure saturated with emotion that is said to have been generated by a lack of or need for the responsibility of the still seemingly sovereign privileged classes.” (Berlant, 2008, 101) Poverty porn functions after all, as a rhetorical device that frames and encloses people into essentialised recipients of affective (love, care), and monetary donations. In humanitarian aid we find people continually making the subjects of aid “rhetorically radiant with attention, compassion, analysis, and sometimes reparation” (101). They are wearing out, worn out - Not only from their everyday living, but the very rhetorical guise of being helpless, forlorn, and love-starved, that we ask them to carry. 🛂 And from the eternal line between hope and subjugation ... possibility and probability ♾ #appadurai #berlant #humanitarian aid

[neonellipsis]

Big bird piñatas, bookstores and indie design stores that occupy pasar senta have kept a growing client base, even if other shops there have begun to move out. A less hyped hipster scene is not necessarily bad; a more mature and flashy #gudangsarinah ekosystem might have more people but fewer thick ties between groups; and a lesson from groups that have lasted: love your community and show it, grow the young, and lock flexible hands with a peer group so work is spread out rather than limited to oneself - or it will die with you. #pasarsenta #Jakarta

[neonellipsis]

Getting used to being in Singapore again isn't hard, just costly. The apartment cat understands the cost of having assets. Having no house but an entire block of homes to himself, he walks the streets (elevators) and rests where he pleases. 😽

[neonellipsis]

We bought the house not for its bones or character, but because it was set against the hill in such a way that made it feel secret and protected. The plan was always to gut it. I wanted to build an entirely organic dwelling, to let the forest wrap around the walls of the house. I explained everything to Emily, how structures should be viewed as unified organisms, and the concept of rooms as cells, and the absurdity of square spaces. We aren’t meant to confine ourselves to rigid lines and two-dimensional walls; nothing else in nature does. Such unimaginative design disrupts harmony and rhythm. It stifles the spirit. It stops the air from flowing through.

She agreed. We knocked down walls and created wide, arched doorways. We put in circular skylights and constructed rooms around natural elements: river rocks, plants, driftwood harvested from the coast. Emily! I would cry, storming through the house to find her, eager to share a new plan. You’re yelling! she’d holler, but I couldn’t stop. And the yelling was different now. I had somewhere positive to channel my excess energy. My anger was lighter, my episodes less frequent. I no longer used substances, no longer left fingerprint-sized bruises on Emily’s wrists. There were no more screaming matches, no more tiny ruptures in her vocal chords that must have made it painful to breathe. The house was fixing all our past slipups, all our faults. We would connect the cells and make a single perfect organism.

I became obsessed with the idea of living walls. I spent hours at nurseries, buying plants by the cartload. The first living wall went in my study, the second in the bedroom. Genius, Emily whispered. She stowed the humidifier in the closet and woke bright-eyed every morning, thrilled at how the increase in oxygen made her feel. Slowly, my obsession was transferred. She would stand over a pot on the stove, lamenting the seasons and how impossible it was to grow anything in the Pacific Northwest. We had leafy greens and onions by the bushel, but almost nothing of another hue until July when the berries appeared. We could have tomatoes, she said, if we had a greenhouse. We could have peppers and orchids. Orchids! She pointed out the window. Our own exotic oasis of plants.

She spent weeks pouring over heirloom seed catalogs. I could almost see her transforming, stretching her leafy arms out from dirt, pushing herself right through the ceiling of our lives. The first night she went to the greenhouse, I watched her float across the yard. Wrapped in a blanket and shivering, pulling all the isolated parts of her body toward the center, like a continent drawing close all the islands that surround it.

- See more at: http://recommendedreading.tumblr.com/post/113952898358/erasure-methods-by-annie-ostlund-recommended-by#sthash.1MhPnxI9.dpuf

[neonellipsis]

trust

Trust!

 To wage war against our neoliberal condition, we need to estabilish new systems of trust.

 Trust has to come on different scales: interpersonal trust, trust in organisations, in institutions, in jobs. In all ‘disembedded’ institutions, which includes our food and energy and water and commodity supply chains, including healthcare and housing. Including long-distance relationships. Anything that has been disembedded from the natural link of time and space—where things can happen in time, unmediated by physical space. (See Giddens opening pages of Chapter 1 for more on this)

 Trust has to come through the bonding of social collectives—community.

 Trust has to come in our ability to trust ourselves to make DIY food, technology, tools for ourselves.

 Trust has to come in the ability for the commons to remain a public good, without being exploited.

 Trust is a rejection of irresponsibility, lies, lip service,that we must somehow manage even as we accept our contemporary condition of plural and open relationships, unbounded selves, non-marriage.

  But perhaps this is less contradictory than it seems. Perhaps what is happening on the interpersonal front is but a prefiguration of the collapse of property regimes and growth of a commons.

[neonellipsis]

Collecting

It occurs to me that what I have been collecting, through the photography project, are not just pictures of my country or portraits of practical objects, but a database that law does not know what to do with. It has no legal standing as a database, only as objects, but reading Marcus Boon again I am reminded that it is a collection, and it has a life of its own--people wanting to analyse it, share it. It wants to be part of the commons (that is after all what it was created for) but is the Open Database License enough to make it part of the commons? Do I want it to become truly a public good, when the rules of the game are still unclear? (think prisoner's dilemma, people exploiting the commons)

Right now the collection is a weighty thing to me. With its semi-legal standing, it exists as a question to me--I am guilty about holding on to it instead of releasing it to the commons, . Could this weight be lifted one day when we remove the need for property? When databases can be part of the commons, and safely belong to all, without being exploited for personal gain?

The idea of giving BY-SA (attribution, share-alike, but possible to use for commercial means) Creative Commons labelling to something in order for it to be taken up by people experimenting with open-source platforms (who are also people whose ideals already are more aligned anti-capitalist, non-commercial ideals) seems contradictory. But it is necessary to open the possibility of commercial gain to entrepreneurs, who, together with their less money-minded technophile counterparts, can then test out the new economics of circulation and transaction.

So perhaps this collection of photos is not only about Singapore, or participation, but also about claiming new legal infrastructure and vocabulary to open the way towards a non-propertied future. 

If people can see this collection as a product of their collective making, and not demand that it be made into the sole property of a company or organisation, then perhaps it means the freedom of ideas has gained currency as a public good, rightful part of the commons.

[neonellipsis]

tides

There’s a push and pull of tides we work with. 

I walk the meandering path and wait for chilly text to morph into sensuous asides.

Unknowing is a thing we are collectively learning to embrace

as your fingers press into the skin of my back, measuring, gauging.

The wait between times is long;

our encounters stark, condensed, intense, dense earth that we take,

and slowly sift through, stretching out the notes of our voices, 

The curl of your arm around;

sift through me.

first written early Nov 2014